JOSC 4 (1) pp.

8797 Intellect Limited 2013

Journal of Screenwriting
Volume 4 Number 1
2013 Intellect Ltd keynote. English language. doi: 10.1386/josc.4.1.87_7

SCREENWRITING CONFERENCE,
BRUSSELS, SEPTEMBER 2011,
CONFERENCE KEYNOTE

Steven Price
Bangor University

The screenplay: An
accelerated critical history1

A recurrent scene near the beginning of several Sherlock Holmes stories 1. This article has its
presents the following sequence of events: (1) Holmes gives a seemingly bril- genetic origins in a
paper delivered at the
liant illustration of his powers; (2) Watson is amazed; (3) Holmes explains that Fourth International
it is a simple matter of empirical observation and logical inference; (4) Watson Screenwriting Research
Network Conference at
then asks Holmes for his thoughts on the case in hand, presumably expect- Brussels in September
ing some repetition of (1) and (3); but (5) Holmes points out that [i]t is a 2011. In rewriting
capital mistake to theorise before you have all the evidence (Doyle 2008: 27). it for publication I
am indebted to the
Of course, the idea that one should follow the facts and not theories is itself comments of several
a theory. For instance, Holmes assumes that evidence is circumscribed: it is delegates, especially
possible to get all of it. But new data may arise that will occasion the rewrit- Paul Wells and Margot
Nash.
ing of the theory, while beyond the confines of the fictional detectives world
what counts as evidence, let alone the methodological strategies that lead to its
interpretation and the shaping of it into narratives and arguments, is always
open to question. One theory may lead the investigator to hunt for data that
another theory would dismiss as quite worthless.

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 Steven Price

Screenwriting research encounters these problems in specific forms. For

instance, it examines texts that have properties distinct from those appropri-
ate to literary studies. With important exceptions screenplays are, in general,
collaborative works-for-hire written for quasi-industrial organizations, and
overtly anticipate realization in a medium (cinema) distinct from their own
(writing). As their anticipated readership is almost invariably confined to
those working within the film industry, only a tiny fraction of the material that
screenwriting researchers may be interested in has been published; much of
the reminder is either unavailable, available only in a single library collection
or simply unknown. Ownership and copyright issues mean that little of this
material can be legally disseminated either in digital or in print form, while
cuts in funding for libraries and universities threaten both the archives them-
selves and those who may wish to visit them. The first way in which the field
has an accelerated critical history, then, is that it has started to accumulate
its materials its evidence very late in the day, compared to cognate fields
such as literary criticism and film studies, and it is doing so without the ready
access to the kinds of stable, published texts that those disciplines, at least
until relatively recently, had assumed unproblematically to be overwhelm-
ingly their most important primary resources.
But screenwriting research also has an accelerated history in a different
sense: as an emerging field, it is still in the process of formulating methodolo-
gies appropriate to the investigation of its materials. Its theories are still busy
being born, and have profited from coming after theories in other disciplines
that have been tried and tested and in crucial respects found wanting. The
first published, book-length study of screenplay texts that pursues the kind of
rigorous critical methodology that we would expect from an academic analysis
only appeared some fifteen years ago (Sternberg 1997), and no organizational
framework for its study existed before Ian Macdonald set up the Screenwriting
Research Network in 2006. In short, screenwriting is a latecomer to the research
party, and the following discussion aims to show that this lateness, this historical
fact of coming after the event, has created both problems and opportunities.
Because the field is inter- and multi-disciplinary in nature, and all of us are
going to know more about some of those disciplines than others, it may be
helpful to follow Steven Maras in borrowing Robert M. Entmans definition of
framing: To frame is to select some aspects of a perceived reality and make them
more salient in a communicating text (quoted in Maras 2009: 10, original empha-
sis). The corollary is that it will not select some aspects of a perceived reality,
and/or will make them less salient. In what follows I shall outline, some-
what arbitrarily, four frames that are currently shaping investigations into
screenwriting. These are (1) the discourses surrounding screenwriting; (2) the
practitioners frame; (3) research and scholarship; and (4) criticism and inter-
pretation. The frames could easily be subdivided, and many others proposed,
notably that of the screenwriting manual. (For a much more extensive set of
discriminations, see Maras (2011).) For reasons that will become clear, I shall
concentrate on the final pair research and scholarship, and criticism and
interpretation and the problematic relations between them, in particular via
some closing observations on the French genetic criticism that is emerging as
the dominant paradigm within the field.
Frame 1: Steven Maras 2009 book Screenwriting: History, Theory and
Practice provides among many other things an invaluable survey of the histor-
ical emergence and development of many of the discourses surrounding
screenwriting:

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 The screenplay

Figure 1: Keynote Speaker Steven Price, Bangor University.

A discourse frame focuses on the way screenwriting has been shaped

and talked about in particular ways. [] Paying attention to discourse
means being attentive to what people say about screenwriting, how they
make sense of it and the way this shapes practice and what is possible
in the world of scripting. [] The history of screenwriting is inseparable
from a history of discourses that surround and constitute screenwriting.
(2009: 1215)

Among the many things that this exceptionally erudite study has brought to
the field are a historical awareness of, and necessary critical self-consciousness
regarding, the ways in which screenwriting scholars conceive of the field and
their own relationships to it. The aspect that it most conspicuously margin-
alizes, meanwhile, is the screenplay text itself, which is almost completely
absent from the book. This is not necessarily a problem in a study of the
discourses surrounding screenwriting, but I would introduce three caveats:
first, that the production of screenwriting texts is a contribution to those
discourses, which therefore do not just surround screenwriting, but emanate
from within it; second, that while screenplays are certainly separable from
screenwriting, in Marass definition of those terms, written texts still consti-
tute a subset of screenwriting and can be investigated as such; and third, that
while screenplays are not autonomous, they nevertheless need not be seen

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 Steven Price

exclusively within their screenwriting or production contexts. The last of these

observations seems the most contentious.
Frame 2: Screenwriters writing about screenwriting is a familiar subset
of the discourses that both surround and emanate from within the writing
process. Of these, Jean-Claude Carrires account is perhaps the most sali-
ent, particularly in the context of his keynote address to the Screenwriting
Research Network conference in Brussels in September 2011, in which
he reiterated a view of the screenplay circulated most widely in The Secret
Language of Film. In that book, Carrire proposes that [o]nce the film exists,
the screenplay is no more. [] [I]t is fated to undergo metamorphosis,
to disappear, to melt into another form, the final form. [] I have often
compared this metamorphosis to the caterpillars transformation into a
butterfly (1995: 148, 150).
This metaphor is in keeping with a history of writing about screenplays
that focuses on their translation into another medium; Andrey Tarkovsky
(himself a writer as well as a director), for example, similarly argues that
[t]he scenario dies in the film. [] The literary element in a film is smelted;
it ceases to be literature once the film has been made (1989: 134, origi-
nal emphasis). For present purposes it need only be noted that, like the
discourse surrounding screenwriting, these metaphors render any residue
any written texts imperceptible, as if screenplays were among the invisible
literatures come suffocatingly to life in a Ballardian dystopia of future point-
lessness:

Invisible literatures proliferate around us today faxes and electronic

mail, press releases and office memoranda, obscure genre fictions
wrapped in metallized jackets that we scarcely notice on the way to
the duty-free shop. One day in the near future [] anthologies of
twentieth-century inter-office memos may be as treasured as the corre-
spondence of Virginia Woolf and T. S. Eliot.
(Ballard 1996: 76)

There are certainly some who regard screenplays as being very like inter-office
memos: as nothing more than a set of notes to a production crew (Luttrell 1998:
10, original emphasis). And in the meantime, even one of the most eminent
of the writers who compose them affirms that when shooting is over, screen-
plays generally end up in studio wastebaskets. They are discarded, quickly
done away with; they have turned into something else; they no longer have
any kind of existence (Carrire 1995: 150).
Frame 3: But even if we were to agree that [t]he screenplay is not the last
stage of a literary journey[;] [i]t is the first stage of a film (Carrire 1995: 151),
it can still have an existence, an afterlife, as the first (or last, or intermediate)
stage of the research of scholars, for whom it may be valuable in, for example,
aiding the understanding of the relationships between screenwriting and film
production. This would include most of the readership of and contributors to
the Journal of Screenwriting, for whom the study of the screenplay text is likely
to be not only a professional necessity, but an important way of understand-
ing a vitally important cultural medium.
To take just one example of the value of such research: in The Classical
Hollywood Cinema, Janet Staiger cites the published Proceedings of the
Research Council, Quarterly Meeting, December 15, 1932, which proposed
the standardization of format of scripts. Staiger argues that [t]he form that

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 The screenplay

eventually became standard (the master-scene) was a combination of theat-

rical and pre-sound film scripts, a variant of the continuity synopsis used in
the 1920s (Bordwell et al. 1985: 323). The book reproduces a facsimile of two
pages from a 1938 script for the Warner Brothers film Juarez (1939). Aside from
the numbering of scenes, this is indeed very close to what we would recog-
nize today as the master-scene format. The implications of Staigers argu-
ment are that the Research Council succeeded in introducing standardization,
that this standard form is similar to that seen in the pages from Juarez, and
that the master-scene script was therefore dominant by the late 1930s. Such
standardization would be in keeping with the influential view that Hollywood
functioned as a quasi-Fordist system of production.
Claudia Sternberg, by contrast, in her analysis of 43 American scripts,
states that screenplays up to the 1950s tended to contain more detailed
camera and shot instructions. Since then the master scene script format, which
only registers changes of place and time, has become the standard form
(1997: 75, original emphasis). At the very least, this posits a date for the stand-
ardization of format some twenty years later than that implied in The Classical
Hollywood Cinema. There is not space here to explore this question in any
detail, but while my own research for a forthcoming History of the Screenplay
tends to lend more support to Sternbergs view, in general the picture appears
a great deal messier, with some evidence of a degree of standardization within
studios, but little between them. The tightest degree of regularization and
control appears to have been exerted at MGM, while a kind of house style
is also apparent at other studios such as Warner Bros. and Paramount. But
inconsistencies abound. A minority of scripts divide the screenplay into an
alphabetized series of sequences (e.g. AH), not unlike the act divisions of a
play. Very occasionally one finds a screenplay for a fiction film that divides the
page into two columns, in documentary-script style, the left reserved for the
scene text and the right for dialogue text. Some scripts will use many paren-
thetical directions concerning the delivery of the dialogue, and others will not.
There is enormous inconsistency in the content and format of slug lines, for
example concerning specification of shot type, inclusion or not of the Day/
Night element (especially in the 1930s), and style. Some scripts are prefaced
with paratextual materials, especially concerning characterization. And there
is extreme inconsistency regarding the numbering system that indicates the
unit of segmentation, which is variously the scene, the shot or merely an indi-
cation of important detail. In most cases there is the additional complication
of determining to what stage in the production process a given iteration of the
screenplay belongs.
This is just a sketch, and some of the daunting volume of material held in
American archives will doubtless lead future scholars to confirm, modify, ques-
tion or overturn the provisional conclusions of current researchers. What can
hardly be disputed is the value of undertaking primary research in the attempt
to establish the ways in which the Hollywood studio system actually operated.
Frame 4: The final frame, that of criticism and interpretation, is the one that
currently seems least amenable to screenwriting studies, partly because the
field is currently and necessarily concerned much more with primary research
into production than with reception, and partly because the screenplay seems
in general less available to literary interpretation than other textual genres.
The possibilities of a screenplay developing a creative afterlife are significantly
lower than that of a play or a novel because, as Carrire and others observe, it
is written specifically to enable a single realization in a different medium, after

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 Steven Price

which its job is to die, having in this respect a life cycle as reminiscent of the
male praying mantis as of the caterpillar.
The theoretical justification for studying texts outside their production
contexts nevertheless seems clear enough. It is bound up with what the
currently highly unfashionable Jacques Derrida terms the general citational-
ity or general iterability of language (1982: 325):

Every sign, linguistic or nonlinguistic, spoken or written (in the usual

sense of this opposition), as a small or large unity, can be cited, put
between quotation marks; thereby it can break with every given context,
and engender infinitely new contexts [] What would a mark be that
one could not cite? And whose origin could not be lost on the way?
(Derrida 1982: 32021, original emphasis)

Once a text has been produced and circulated, it becomes detached from
its producer and subject to whatever use anyone subsequently chooses to
make of it.
The danger is that this opens up textual studies to pure subjectivity, which,
particularly in the context of a new field attempting to establish valid frames
through which its object may be defined, may at best seem pointless. Perhaps
the key site for the debate of this topic in literary studies is Stanley Fishs
book Is There a Text in This Class?: The Authority of Interpretive Communities.
The title of the essay that in turn gave the book its title was prompted, Fish
tells us, by an incident on his university campus when a student asked one of
Fishs colleagues, in this class do we believe in poems and things, or is it just
us? (1980: 305). In other words, do we believe that the text produces mean-
ings to which we respond, or do we, in effect, create the text by following
the methodologies prescribed by the interpretive communities of which we
are members? Fish argues for the latter, which helps to explain his devastat-
ing formulation in a different essay in the book: theories always work and
they will always produce exactly the results they predict [] Indeed, the trick
would be to find a theory that didnt work (Fish 1980: 68, original emphasis).
This cuts both ways. On the one hand, the student who does not believe in
poems and things has in an important sense made the text disappear, and risks
bringing into being a critical world in which anything goes. She has commit-
ted what Sherlock Holmes identifies as the capital mistake of twist[ing]
facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts (Doyle 2008: 431). On
the other hand, theories always work because they are a precondition of
scholarship, helping to determine which facts to investigate and what value
to attribute to them. Moreover, general iterability is a condition of all texts,
and all scholarship. Fishs interpretive communities are very similar to the
frames of media and communications theory, which select some aspects of a
perceived reality and make them more salient in a communicating text. They
cannot be dispensed with: there is no position that is outside the frame that is
not a member of some interpretive community. The only way we can halt this
process of selection and interpretation is by not citing: by making the marks
inaccessible or invisible or dead, or just ignoring them. We, however, have
chosen to become members of a community dedicated to picking up those
traces and making uses of them even in ways that may be of no interest to
those who produced them in the first place.
The attempt to reconcile scholarly research with a methodology
informed by a critical engagement with recent theory is one of the things

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 The screenplay

that has drawn screenwriting research to French genetic criticism (genetic

here referring to the genesis of the artwork). For example, many outstand-
ing papers on work in progress delivered at the London Screenwriting
Research Seminar series (Macdonald 2011; Rossholm 2012; Davies 2012)
have exploited its methodology, and it is certain to inform several signifi-
cant publications in the very near future. So far it has largely been applied to
reconstructing the screen ideas (Macdonald 2004) behind individual films;
in time it may also enable broader, perhaps more collaborative approaches
to a larger corpus of texts.
Both screenwriting studies and genetic criticism have emerged quite
recently, towards the end of what might be described as a three-stage critical
history that is shared by many disciplines in the humanities. This history is
very familiar, but nevertheless worth briefly retracing here via Daniel Ferrer
and Michael Grodens introduction to the influential 2004 anthology Genetic
Criticism: Texts and Avant-Texts. The manuscript research of the first stage
tended to be pragmatic and not theoretically self-conscious, to consider textu-
ality and intention as unproblematic, and to see the manuscripts exclusively
in relation to the subsequent published work (Ferrer and Groden 2004: 5).
Within literary studies, this confidence in the text as a stable, autonomous
object, and in corresponding objectivity in reading, can be seen in the verbal
icons and well-wrought urns of the New Criticism, which was highly influ-
ential between the 1920s and the 1950s. In the second stage, roughly from
the late 1960s to the end of the 1980s, critical theory radically destabilizes
the text, prompted by a structuralist conception of a synchronous or time-
lessly present text, for example, or of a post-structuralist idea that all texts
are fields of free-playing signifiers. In the third stage, scholarship returns to
the world of historical development and context (Ferrer and Groden 2004: 5),
but now armed with methodologies influenced by the preceding theoretical
phase. In this current stage much pure critical theory appears outmoded,
whereas genetic criticism has not only outlasted Roland Barthess death,
Tzvetan Todorovs retreat into ethics, and Grard Genettes passage from
narratology to general aesthetics, it is only now reaching maturity (Ferrer and
Groden 2004: 2).
A major reason for its current prominence is that it combines the virtues
of primary archival research with a critical self-consciousness about the rela-
tionship between the research methodology and its object, and the instability
of the latter:

Like old-fashioned philology or textual criticism, [genetic criticism]

examines tangible documents such as writers notes, drafts, and proof
corrections, but its real object is something much more abstract not the
existing documents but the movement of writing that must be inferred
from them. Then, too, it remains concrete, for it never posits an ideal
text beyond those documents but rather strives to reconstruct, from all
available evidence, the chain of events in a writing process.
(Ferrer and Groden 2004: 2)

This movement of writing is the avant-texte, which is the defining insight

of genetic criticism. The aim is to seize and describe a movement, a process of
writing that can only be approximately inferred from the existing documents;
it pursues an immaterial object (a process) through the concrete analysis of
the material traces left by that process (Ferrer and Groden 2004: 11).

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 Steven Price

That sounds rather like much current work on screenplay texts, especially
in relation to film production. The marriage is likely to prove especially fertile,
because both genetic criticism and screenwriting research seek to bridge the
gap between theory and research, bind the text to its moment of production,
see the text(s) as unstable, encompass multiple media, and tend to position
themselves as coming, as it were, after the event. Genetic criticism may also
prove a peculiarly apposite means of approaching some of the problemat-
ics within screenwriting that distinguish it from other forms of literature,
especially those of collaboration and the anticipated realization in another
medium. Macdonald finesses what he has previously termed the screen idea
(2004) as the screen-text, by analogy with the avant-texte, and proposes to
supplement this with study of the informing poetics:

if we can reconstitute not just the screen-text but also something of the
poetics that informed the screenwriter, a study of their belief system
rather than just the industrial context, we have something an inform-
ing poetics that we can use to understand that screenwriters work.
(Macdonald 2010: 5, original emphasis)

The work of Macdonald and others in exploring screenwriting via genetic crit-
icism is extremely significant, and wholly desirable as a means of reconciling
theory with practice and textual scholarship. My aim in the remainder of this
article is merely to suggest that, like any act of framing, it brings certain oper-
ations into sharper focus while marginalizing others, especially if we were to
concur that you can[t] study individuals or scripts in isolation from [] the
informing poetics of that time and place (Macdonald 2010: 12). First of all,
this would, in keeping with Ferrer and Grodens arguments, make screenplay
analysis a merely reconstructive activity, and one that would be both impos-
sibly ambitious (there is no limit to the material we could determine as having
some influence on the informing poetics) and impossibly limited (there is no
way we can simply reconstruct that historical moment without in some way
bringing in our own, for example, or without in some way conceding that the
historical moment itself is not circumscribed). This is not so much a criticism
as a restatement of an unavoidable condition: similar caveats could be raised
against any act of critical framing, and critical framing is what all of us are
doing all of the time.
More specifically, however, attempting to define the avant-texte could
become another iteration of the original sin of screenwriting research, which
has proceeded from the beginning on the assumption that there is an ontologi-
cal problem surrounding its object (see Horne 1992; Price 2010: 4353), with-
out going through that long period of data collection and textual analysis that
preceded the development of related arguments in literary studies. What Maras
terms the object problem is in part produced by the framing activities that
affirm its existence, and to these can now be added the mystery of the avant-
texte, the pursuit of which Macdonald (2011) compares to chasing rainbows.
In practice, however, there are pragmatic limitations beyond which the pursuit
of the avant-texte is likely to show diminishing returns: it may be extremely
useful in helping to trace a shaping narrative to the production of certain inde-
pendent films, for example, but less so in relation to the modular packages
that have formed much of Hollywoods production since the late 1970s.
Finally, the possibilities opened up by the historical conjunction of
genetic criticism and screenwriting studies could threaten to close down any

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other possibilities that may emerge from studying screenplays outside their
informing poetics. That the text can be detached from its original context
and reinscribed within others that cause it to lose its origins will come as
no surprise to screenwriters who are used to seeing their work rewritten by
others. Meanwhile, there are critical and other readerships for screenplays
that lie outside their moment of production. For example, several critics (e.g.
Sternberg 1997: 7176; Igelstrm 2011; Davies 2012) have noted the wide-
spread variation between screenplays when it comes to the presence and
extent of narratorial commentary, which logically ought to be absent if the text
is indeed nothing more than a set of notes to a production crew.
In any case, the need to address that crew forms only one of the structures
informing the organization of the text. Another is the screenplays internal
organization: a line early in a screenplay will often be echoed by another later
on, characters will be paired (hero and villain) and so on. Under the aegis of
genetic criticism and its interest in tracing the creative process, we are perhaps
more likely to make reference to the significations of images, combinations of
words, recurrent tropes and so on, as they resonate not only for the writer(s),
but and this is where we would have to go beyond genetic criticism for
readers and audiences. To take a crude example, a Google search for best
one-liners in films threw up as the first sentence in the first hit: We all know
some of the famous on[e]-liners from the movies, but some of them are so
commonplace that you may not even know that its a quote from a movie or
from which movie it originated (Fitzgerald 2008). This phenomenon is one
illustration of a creative afterlife of screenplays that detaches them from their
original production to circulate in new contexts. And to take a single writ-
ers work to provide other examples, David Mamets screenplay for his own
film House of Games (1987) was adapted by Richard Bean into a play staged at
Londons Almeida theatre in 2010, while his script for Wag the Dog (directed
by Barry Levinson, 1997) acquired new resonances when it appeared to antici-
pate some of the future actions of then-President Bill Clinton.
Perhaps these are chance exceptions to a general rule. But all scholarly
writing about screenplays will always reinscribe them within new contexts
provided by the scholars critical framing, including the newly discovered
frame of the avant-texte, and there is no reason why that framing should
always be reconstructive. To take one, final example: the Margaret Herrick
Library at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Los Angeles
holds a substantial archive relating to Mack Sennett, especially covering
the Triangle-Keystone years between 1915 and 1917. This shows that the
company would begin with story synopses that were then refined, often in
great detail, and which generated further textual materials through to post-
production. (Tom Stempel (1988) was the first to recognize the significance
in the history of screenwriting of the Sennett and other scripts at the MHL.)
But we could also detach these texts from their origins and frame them
differently. For example, the companys quasi-industrial methods of working
generated a stream of texts that continually recycle and recombine the same
elements: there is relentless repetition of similar situations, while characters
have no identity (this is even more striking in the scripts than the films) and
are reduced to mere ciphers, puppets to be used at the whim of those who
control them. The repetitive dehumanization of the process brings to (my)
mind the Marquis de Sades The 120 Days of Sodom, and more generally a
theatre of cruelty encompassing at one extreme the present-day comedy of
embarrassment (for instance, The Office), and at another the theatre of the

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 Steven Price

absurd, such as the plays of Samuel Beckett, which routinely display their
authors fascination with slapstick and silent film comedy. I could, perhaps,
start to extend this into a theory about how screenplay texts are by their
nature self-contradictory, creating characters that on the one hand are placed
in situations that ask them to make choices, and on the other are mere victims
of a set of instructions to a faceless industrial crew who will manipulate them
for their own fun and profit. If I were to do that, however, I would always
have to bear in mind that [t]he temptation to form premature theories upon
insufficient data is the bane of our profession (Doyle 2008: 319).

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Film, New York: Continuum.
Sternberg, Claudia (1997), Written for the Screen: The American Motion-Picture
Screenplay as Text, Tbingen: Stauffenburg.
Tarkovsky, Andrey (1989), Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema (trans.
Kitty Hunter-Blair), rev. ed., London: Faber.

suggested citatioN
Price, S. (2013), The screenplay: An accelerated critical history, Journal of
Screenwriting 4: 1, pp. 8797, doi: 10.1386/jocs.4.1.87_7

Contributor details
Steven Price is Senior Lecturer in English at Bangor University. He is the
author of The Plays, Screenplays and Films of David Mamet (2008) and The
Screenplay: Authorship, Theory and Criticism (2010).
Contact: School of English, Bangor University, Bangor, Gwynedd, LL57 2DG,
UK.
E-mail: els024@bangor.ac.uk

Steven Price has asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that was
submitted to Intellect Ltd.

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